Leah Sparks (MBA '01)

Leah Sparks (MBA '01)

Co-founder and CEO of Wildflower Health Inc.San Francisco, California

Wildflower Health provides a mobile health-engagement platform to improve healthcare quality and lower medical costs. The company aspires to leverage a unique set of analytics to deliver novel insights that improve treatment and cost-management in the clinical areas it supports.

Leah Sparks’ big idea
crystalized when she was expecting her first child. Frustrated by the
challenges of managing health-plan benefits and a myriad of appointments, she realized
there was a huge gap in the health care system around the needs of pregnant
women. In 2012, seeing an opportunity
to harness mobile technology to
improve women’s experiences and outcomes, Sparks and co-founder Kathy Bellevin launched Wildflower Health. The
venture has since raised $15 million, and its focus on expectant mothers has
widened to include other stages of life and health care needs. The company now works
with nearly 100 hospitals and health
plans that cover almost 50 million people.

Sean Carr: What took you down the entrepreneurial path? How did
you get from being a Darden graduate in 2001 to where you are now?

Leah Sparks: When I was
at Darden, it was the end of the golden age of startups in California, and we
talked a lot about how so many dot-com business models lacked viability. I was
finishing business school as the bubble was bursting, and I had two
aspirations. One, I wanted to work in an industry where I could make a positive
impact on people’s lives, and health care rose to the top. Two, I wanted to work
in a company that had an almost industrial business model, so I could dig into
something real. That’s how I ended up interning at McKesson after my First Year
at Darden, and after graduation I joined McKesson’s strategy team.

At McKesson, I successfully started two
business units, and my boss said something that really hit me: “Leah, some
people are maintainers. They’re good at running large stable businesses. Other
people are builders. They are good at innovating and creating new things. And I
think you’re more of the latter.” That was a pivotal moment for me, someone
articulating what I’ve known about myself since childhood. Because I really
wanted to start a business not just inside a big company, I launched a small
dot-com on the side. That’s when I decided that I wanted to do entrepreneurship
and health care. I also knew that I needed to learn more, so after six years at
McKesson, I left to join a personalized medicine startup.

Sean Carr: That must have been an interesting moment for you to
jump ship from McKesson, which had everything you had wanted. And yet you took
the plunge. How did you know that that was the right move?

Leah Sparks: I’m not sure
that I did. It was a big leap. I took a pay cut, and I went from those fancy offices
in downtown San Francisco to a waterfront shack. It was a dramatic change, but
I loved it, and I learned so much. One of the things I learned is that there are
easier ways to make money than being an entrepreneur, particularly in
health care. I also learned that if I was going to do it and deal with the
blood, sweat, and tears and the loneliness, I had to do something that I was
really passionate about.

Sean Carr: Tell us about launching Wildflower.

Leah Sparks: Often, the
first time people deal with the healthcare system is when they have their first
pregnancy. In 2012, when I got pregnant, everything was phone and paper-based,
and I got this piece of paper from my health plan that said, “You’re high-risk
because you’re over 35. Please call us.” I was comparing that experience to
using the BabyCenter app, where I could get this great content, like finding
the right stroller. I realized that if we harnessed that technology, we could
not only improve the experience, but also identify high-risk women, connect
them to the right intervention, so that we could move the needle on outcomes. Given
the rates of poor outcomes and lack of quality measures in the U.S. in
maternity care, I knew there were billions of dollars to be saved with better
consumer activation and connection to care.

Sean Carr: Could you describe Wildflower’s business model and
tell us how you developed it?

Leah Sparks: The
health care industry is a complicated system that’s not primed for risk-taking.
I knew that nobody’s going to buy anything just because it’s innovative and
better; it had to save someone money or make someone money. First, we tried to
figure out who was on the hook for bad outcomes. At the time, it was health
plans. So we focused on health plans, having a software licensing model that
was tied to having ROI. We didn’t know we would have the outcomes that we thought
we would, but we did a lot of testing with consumers to show that they would
use an application like this and do that to connect to health care.

Frankly, the
stakes are so high and the ROI is so obvious that it was easier for us to get
our first clients to take that leap of faith. What’s interesting is that we
were in an incubator in San Francisco, and I thought that our first clients
would be based in Silicon Valley. But our first client was the State of Wyoming
Medicaid, and the second one was Apple. Most of our clients have their own
version of the application. They may be using our Wildflower version, but
they’ve configured it with their content, their interventions, their clinical
logic, so that it’s really attuned to their patient population and to the ROI
measures they’re focused on.

We’ve been
at this for five years since we got our first institutional funding, and we’ve
gone beyond just pregnancy. We go end-to-end from pre-conception all the way
through family health. When people start a family, they also begin that journey
in a sandwiched generation — taking care of the kids and ageing parents—and so
many health care decisions swirl around a family. So it really helps humanize
the experience when you center it around taking care of those you love and help
drive those connections to our clients that provide that ROI.

Sean Carr: Where do you see the future for Wildflower Health,
and what are the next mountains you hope to climb?

Leah Sparks: In the past
five years, we’ve expanded not only the product but also the client type, so we
now work with health plans that cover almost 50 million people. Two years ago,
we got in the hospital market, and we have about 100 hospitals in our client
network, and that’s a big growth area for us. We want to be a personalization
platform for families, providing highly personalized content and connections
across every life stage. We think about how to knit together our client network
to do that better.

Sean Carr: Looking back, how did your Darden experience
influence or inform how you’ve carved out your career so far?

Leah Sparks: I was a
journalism undergrad, and I came to Darden hungry to learn —l earn how to read
financial statements and how to think about business strategy. I loved all
quantitative classes. Later, when I was starting Wildflower, I remember
downloading papers on venture capital terms and term sheets available to alumni,
so Darden continued to be a resource. Really, Darden gave me the foundation for
all my business knowledge and skills, and I’ve used those skills throughout my
career.